In conjunction with The Historical Fiction Club on Facebook, our main Historical Fiction group for all readers and authors of the genre, we are welcoming Mary Armstrong to an author takeover of the Club on Monday, June 14, 2021. We'd love for you to join the discussion! If you want to ask questions, see some great content about her book, and enter some giveaways, please join here: The Historical Fiction Club (and, please, don't forget to answer ALL the questions to obtain membership to the private FB group.
And now, more about Mary...
Mary lives in the heart of one of the ‘Two Valleys’ in Las Cruces New Mexico, with her husband Norman ‘Skip’ Bailey, Jr. and their Cavachon child-dog, Java. In 2017 she wrote the one-act play, “It is Blood,” which was selected for a performance by the Las Cruces Community Theatre. Whereas the Two Valleys series is a prequel to the notorious and unsolved murders of Albert J. Fountain and his eight-year-old son, her play, “It is Blood,” is a sequel to those events.
Mary has diverse interests but has focused on historical fiction over the last ten years. Her writing is fast-moving, thought-provoking and with just enough wordsmithing to satisfy your artistic hankerings. Since retiring from a diverse career in various planning and design fields, she has devoted herself to writing, being a good spouse, serving her dog Java, and slipping away to the golf course when unchained to the desk.
Her life motto, “I haven’t done it all and I may have done too much, and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” is a fair bellwether for Mary’s writing.
What People Say About Mary’s Work
From start to finish, I relished the tenderness and closeness of Jesus’s new family. That closeness created a comfortable zone to read and learn about those two valleys in the New Mexico desert. Larry Murley, Author
I’m totally immersed in the story! The detail has me right there with Zio and Jesus! Joy Flemming, Musician
Drama, action, depth, historic context, humor … “The Mesilla” has it all! Victor Zamora, Critic
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BOOK BLURB
At 14 years old, Jesus ‘Chuy’ Perez Contreras Verazzi Messi is too small and frail to work the land on the family farm near the Rio Bravo in Mexico. The local padre’s tutoring reveals Jesus’s unending curiosity and fertile mind. Noted Las Cruces, New Mexico attorney and politician, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain agrees to take his nephew, under his wing. Jesus ‘reads law’ with his uncle and shares adventures and adversity with the Fountains and other historic Mesilla and Tularosa Valley citizens. His coming of age story will take you into the wild southwest, a brewing range war, a territory struggling toward statehood, courtroom dramas, and the adventures and adversities of a boy’s quest for manhood. *A fictional memoir by Jesus about the ten years leading to the notorious and unsolved Fountain murders.
